City Noise Quotes

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in New York City. I vastly prefer living in the country. I just need a lot of quiet and solitude, and I'm so easily distracted. I mean, the Internet is enough to deal with.

When I walk down the street in New York, I swear to God, the building constructor, the guy pounding cement and what not, will yell, 'Hey, you hockey puck!'

L.A.'s a lot of noise and stuff. You always hear cars and stuff.

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

Life is a long headache in a noisy street.

I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.

There's more people to ignore in New York or Boston than there are in Milwaukee, but I would still ignore them, probably.

I love L.A. I always have such a great time in L.A. The way I kind of define me and L.A. is the noise of the factory doesn't let me sleep well.

There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land far, far away.

I used to live in L.A. so, I was always outdoors.

When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.

I don't do really well in cities, which is crazy given that we're flying in and out of these major cities every week.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

How real can your music be if you wake up in the morning hearing birds and crickets? I never hear birds when I wake up. Just a lot of construction work, the smell of Chinese takeout, children screaming, and everybody knocking a different track from 'Ready to Die' as they pass down the street.

Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city, it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery, it's a pen that scratches.

I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn't escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic.

The fact is I like Mumbai less and less. My son says, 'Baba, let's go for a drive', and I tell him, 'Where's the fun of a drive in this place?' You get caught in a million traffic jams, and you spend time cooped in your car with all that mad cacophony around you.

You just let your lower self go, and then it takes on all these aspects of the society - the city with horns blowing, the people yelling things at each other, and the all-in-all violence and chaos of the city. Put that on stage with music, and that's what this is.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.

All people talk of money sometimes, everywhere. But not for all people, everywhere, is money the addiction, the obsession, the stimulant, that it seems to be in New York. It is a large part of the clamor, and it is the voice - quite literally - of the man in the street.

If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.

The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ